When my boss okayed the girls to get an Airbnb in Fort Lauderdale, I’m not going to lie; I was a little pissed about it. Not because the move didn’t make sense; people want to see the girls on camera. I have acne and can’t shave properly; they get offered thousands of dollars for pictures of their feet. I was jealous. Fuck that. My boys and I have been working here for way longer than them. After expressing my frustration (albeit perhaps a little too aggressively) my boss said oh yeah, you guys want to do content somewhere? How’s Scranton, Pennsylvania. Beggars can’t be choosers. We wanted to get paid to film content somewhere, and he gave us Scranton, so we did it.
Day One: Scranton is only about two hours from my house. The drive consisted of Toby, my podcast co-host and TFM’s marketing guy, ripping ass for two straight hours as Tyler Childers radio accompanied our drive through forgotten America. When we finally arrived, we walked into the first motel my boss had selected and got the cops called on us almost immediately because we had a camera. It was a two-star motor lodge that smelt like shit, we were forced to delete the footage and the whole thing was a mess. To clear our heads, we checked out the building featured on The Office’s title sequence, then checked into a new hotel we found. We did a poor job explaining this in the videos, but essentially my boss came up with the idea that two out of the three of us would sleep in a shitty motel, and the kid that impressed him the most in the day’s footage could sleep in a three-star Marriott down the street.
Day Two: Day two was fucking sick. The vlog is a little bit long-form, so if you’re interested in getting to know the minds behind one of your favorite Instagram accounts, it’s worth giving a watch. I also had violent diarrhea the entire day. We went to Susquehanna Brewery and got a shit ton of free beer and a tour because they saw we had nice video equipment. After that, a TFM fan that goes to Scranton gave us his address, told us he was hucking cubes, and we pulled through. The University of Scranton doesn’t have greek life, but we got the vibe that these guys were as close as you could get to the house people frequented to have a good time. I’d be remiss if I didn’t also add that they had really hot girlfriends—shoutout to those kings.
Day Three: We combined footage from day three and four into one video, which is why when we are interviewing the fucked up guy that says the word “arbitrarily” twenty-five times in his manifesto about racism, we don’t have spray tans. I’m not going to lie, we were drunk the whole time we were there, but night two was especially bad off-camera, so we were fucking exhausted filming for days three and four. We did some man-on-the-street stuff to counter the girls interviewing people in Miami, got spray tans (as a joke hahaha definitely a fucking joke dude…Jesus Christ what don’t you get it was a fucking joke), and I still had diarrhea.
I loved getting to know the kids at Scranton and talking to the blue-collar folks from the greater Scranton area. I wish we could have done more on-camera stuff interviewing people about their lives, but many of them didn’t want to be on camera…which is fair enough. Being from somewhat of a rural town myself, it was awesome to see Toby (born in London) interact with the people who work in the industries to whom we don’t give enough credit. With that being said, the best part of the whole trip was the fact that we pizza dicked an influencer. If you don’t listen to our podcast, “Pizza Dicking” is a concept Conall came up with where you spam an influencer conducting an AMA Instagram live asking them questions about what it’s like having pizza dick. It makes no fucking sense; it’s actually the stupidest thing ever, but seeing someone with a verified account stop their live stream in order to address one-hundred comments that say pizza dick on the first date, what do I do?! is the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.
